


Edge: Prelude: Habitual Motions, The

by thebasement_archivist



Category: The X-Files
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-09-30
Updated: 1999-09-30
Packaged: 2018-11-20 05:13:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11329284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebasement_archivist/pseuds/thebasement_archivist
Summary: Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived atThe Basement, which moved to the AO3 to ensure the stories are always available and so that authors may have complete control of their own works. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in June 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address onThe Basement's collection profile.





	Edge: Prelude: Habitual Motions, The

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Basement](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Basement), which moved to the AO3 to ensure the stories are always available and so that authors may have complete control of their own works. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in June 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [The Basement's collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/thebasement/profile).

 

The Edge by ALR

Title: The Edge  
Author: ALR  
Part: Prelude: Habitual Motions 1/2?  
Rating: R for language and adult situations (no graphic sex atall, tho)  
Pairings: The story itself is Langly/Byers, tho there's only pre- stuff in this part. There is some Langly/m (it's a surprise).  
Disclaimer: The words are mine; the characters and some concepts and settings are Carter et al's.  
Archive: list yes, all others please contact first ()  
Notes: arg. well, here goes. my first attempt at slash. it insisted on having an intense plot regardless of my urgings otherwise. angst anyone? feedback would be highly appreciated. still working on the rest of the chapters. many thanks to all the wonderful slash writers who helped inspire, and who help us frolic happily in the land o' slash, especially the brave souls who pen L/B stuffs.  
I hope I got the formatting right. <>s indicate character thought, //s italics. I'm not sure how long/short each post should be, so if someone could let me know if this size/format is all right, I'd appreciate it, then I'll post the rest of the prelude appropriately.

* * *

On top of the world  
looking over the edge  
you could see them coming  
You looked too small  
in their big black car  
to be a threat to the men in power...

But every time it rains  
you're here in my head  
like the sun coming out...  
\- Kate Bush, 'Cloudbusting'

The Edge - Prelude: Habitual Motions - 0/?

Langly sits at his computer, typing fast. When he is concentrating on something intently, he has a habit of tucking his tongue into the corner of his mouth, like a child. He's doing that now. He leans forward slightly, and his hair falls into his face. His eyes are obscured behind two small bluish squares of light, reflection from the monitor on his glasses. John watches from the doorway, not sure if the other man is aware of his presence.

<Funny how you come to know the habits that make up your friends>, John is thinking. <Take them for granted, because the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So the parts cease to be important.>

<Then why do you look at him when he doesn't know you're there?>

Because of what he saw yesterday. But the truth is that he's been doing this, finding himself focused on Langly, for quite some time now. Yesterday's events just forced him to ask himself why, and it's not a question he can answer. His mind slips deftly away, and returns to its quiet observation mode. The subject: one Ringo Langly, paranoia artiste and all-around geek. Our mission: to examine the nature of this subject, his motivations and expressions of self, and to discover, in short, what makes him tick.

<Oh, hell, Byers. Really.>

Really. Because he has come to realize that he has no real idea what the whole of Langly is. His thoughts drift and crash around, and he studies his friend.

As he watches, Langly hisses quietly between his teeth, annoyed at something on the screen. This quiet, private sound makes John feel like an intruder, and a vague sense of shame rises up in him. He's accostomed to that, though. He wants to be bold, straightforward, brave, but really he can't escape his inner prude. It overwhelms him now, and he moves silently away.

A few moments after he is gone, Langly slowly turns his head and looks at the space Byers occupied. His hands hover over the keyboard, motionless. After a long moment he shakes his head, once, and turns back to the screen.

Whatever thoughts he has are hidden behind his steady expression and the light and color reflected over his eyes.

  
Later, laying on his bed, still dressed, John Fitzgerald Byers entertains morbid thoughts. This has become a habit lately, since he received The Letter. He stretches out on his back, arms at his sides, with the lights out. He imagines coffins: lowered into the ground, set on display surrounded by flowers, slowly moving into a furnace. Snippets of that Tom Stoppard play - and movie - float through his mind: "Did you ever think of yourself as actually dead, laying in a box with a lid on it? Silly to be depressed by it, really. I mean, one thinks of it like being alive in a box. One keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead. Which should make all the difference. Shouldn't it."

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, it was called. Langly loves that movie. Byers, from inside the box, remembers Langly hunched forward on the couch, eyes sparkling, saying 'no, wait, listen to this part. I love this part. Best part' over and over. Narrow shoulders drawn up, hands clasped over the knees. Sometimes Langly sprawls and sometimes it seems like he wants to take up as little space as possible, to become a point. Lose his dimensions. And was this what John Byers would be thinking when the earth came splattering down on the coffin's lid?

Of a man whose mind is, despite everything, unfamiliar, to whom certain things have never and will never be said? Stupid black glasses and childish giggling, a face that could go from innocent to jaded without a moment's warning?

Abruptly John stands and turns on the light. His hand hovers near the doorknob. He feels something shifting inside him, deep in his bones. Some decision is being reached, somewhere in his subroutines, and his conscious mind is not being consulted in the matter. The only memo he gets comes in the form of another line from that damn movie.

"Life in a box is better than no life at all...I expect."

He falls back on the bed, pulls a pillow over his face, and at some point falls asleep. He leaves the light on.

In the morning, he doesn't remember his dreams.

  
The Letter - it has taken on the capitals quite on its own -arrived three days ago. It came in a plain white business envelope, with his name and address neatly typed on the front. There was no stamp, and no return address. It was inside his post office box, along with a friendly form letter that wished him to purchase shares in a beach home in Florida and a handful of bills he'd already payed.

He stood in front of the box for a long moment, holding the thin envelope in his hands. The muted rush of activity around him sounded like a wave - skirts whispering around legs, voices muttering numbers, pages being turned, the clink of change in a machine, all rolling together into gentle static, mixing with the sudden ringing in his ears.

<Must think, Byers> he told himself. <Careful now. Only you and this post office have a key to this box. That means someone has broken in to your apartment and taken the key, then replaced it; or whoever left this here is a postal employee; or someone broke into the post office and took the key. Great. How helpful. --Not heavy enough to be a bomb. Could be poison, or a virus.>

As always when he had to think like this, he reminded himself that there had been a time when he never had to think like this.

Finally he decided to find a public bench somewhere and take his chances. Sooner or later you had to hold your breath and take the leap past the fear. If you had to worry about every envelope, every knock at the door, to the point where you were paralyzed, then you might as well just open the damn thing. Or so Byers had come to believe.

  
He found the spot - an unoccupied bench near a bus stop, close to the post office - and sat, still holding the envelope. Its blandness, its unmarked white surface, started to look horribly threatening to him. His suit felt awkward around him. <Breathe, Byers. Breathe.>

He remembered a conversation he'd had with Mel some weeks before. They were sitting around the HQ, pretending to work on some article but really just quietly melting in the heat and hanging out. He'd made a comment about Mulder - about how spending time with Mulder was like hanging out a sign that read 'sitting ducks here'. Frohike had given him that look, the one that told John he'd gone and been a nave fool again.

"They don't need a sign," Mel had said. "Do you really think we're getting away with anything here?"

"What do you mean?" John had leaned forward, head tilted to one side.

"What do I mean?" Mel echoed. "Come on. We're walking around because they let us walk around. Once they decide we're more trouble breathing, we're history."

"Then why do we bother?" John rubbed at his eyes, suddenly exhausted. Of course he knew his friend was right, but he didn't like to think about it.

"What?" Suddenly Frohike was standing, looking at him with that expression again, this time mixed with genuine incredulty. "You mean you don't know?"

John had blinked, shook his head. "No," he'd said quietly. "I guess I do."

There was a long silence, and Mel sat back down, still looking at him.

Finally he spoke, and John looked up.

"We do what we can," Frohike had said, almost gently, "because not doing it means that there really is nothing good left. But never think they won't come for us, eventually. In my dreams - " he paused here, suddenly having moved from the area of dramatic speech into that of actual personal confession. "In my dreams. I open the door, and there's a man with no face on the other side. And he says...He says 'It's time.' That's all. That's the...the last thing I ever hear. And the last thing I feel is...completely unsurprised."

With that, he'd walked away, leaving John staring at his hands and wondering how exactly things got so far out of hand.

Now, on the bench, his fear faded. He knew what was in the envelope. He'd known since he took it out of that little metal box. No matter what the letter inside said, what it would really say is just two words, which have come to chase around his brain at night when he's pretending he can sleep, thanks to Mel.

Nothing left to do but open it, and he did. He expected no surprise, but got one, and for a moment he thought he must be dreaming. Because on the white sheet of paper, carefully folded in half, there were just two words, and they were the same two words from Mel's infectious dream.

'It's time'.

Then the fear returned, huge and creeping. He was suddenly intensely aware of two things at once: One, everything was about to change, and two, he had to find Frohike and Langly immediately and tell them the HQ was bugged.

And then.

It is the /and then/ he has been avoiding thinking about. All his thoughts in the last three days have started from the Letter, but they have all ended up with the and then, with what happened next. It's almost funny - in the past three days he has had to confront all his most paranoid imaginings, but this one thing sticks more than anything else. Perhaps because paranoia has become a way of life, but what he saw that night when he finally found Langly presents entirely new and disturbing possibilities.

<making a big deal out of nothing> he tells himself. Then: <but how well do you really know him? and are you really worried about whether he's trustworthy? could it just be a case of the green - >

No. He couldn't go there. Not yet. Not ever, by god. Someone had sent him a vague but obvious anonymous threat, someone wanted him to know they were listening and that he was in danger. And then -

And then.

  
No one was at the headquarters, which was unusual in itself. Sure they all had places of their own - well, he and Frohike did, anyway, Langly seemed to lose apartments like other people lost car keys, but he hadn't been sleeping at the HQ this week so it was safe to assume he was hanging onto a place for the time being. Nvertheless, most of their time was spent there. As he looked around the dusty, quiet place he remembered that Mel was off on one of his more fantastical goose chases, after some former Air Force pilot who claimed he'd seen a governement installation for breeding and making soliders of yetis. He sifted through a handful of scrap paper and came up with Langly's address, written in his own precise handwriting.

He should have thought it through. Now, as he plays out the events of that night over and over in his mnd, he knows that. He'd checked the security measures, and they were all in place. He'd gone over the place for bugs and found nothing. But The Letter couldn't just be a coincidence, and therefore someone must be listening in on conversations in the HQ. The other possibility - the one keeping him awake nights now - never even threatened to occur to him.

So he slipped the paper into a pocket and headed out again, to consult with Langly on the problem. He even had a key - the boy whose parents had seen fit to curse with the name Ringo had a fear of having some kind of accident and being trapped in his apartment. Or so he said. More likely, Byers suspected, he had an understanding of his own basic forgetfulness and didn't want to end up locked out.

Those were the idle thoughts he had as he slipped the key in the ignition, checked the mirrors, fasted his seatbelt, and set out. Innocense, he'd once heard Mulder say, ended when you became able to perform your habitual motions while the world ended around you. "You're the most grown-up person I've ever met, Byers," he'd said. "You'd brush your teeth the night before your own execution."

John Byers didn't like Mulder very much when Mulder was drunk.

<it's time to think about it now, Byers>, he thinks, looking at himself in the bathroom mirror.

He arrived at Langly's just after six in the evening. He locked his car up carefully, climbed a set of rickety stairs that smelled of curry and old urine. Knocked once at the door, and heard no answer. Knocked again. Nothing. Put they key in the lock. Turned it.

Opened the door.

Langly was by the far wall, near a window with the shade drawn. All Byers could see was his profile, tilted back. He wasn't wearing his glasses, and for a moment Byers found himself unable to think anything but <why doesn't he just get contacts?> His brain was having trouble taking in what he saw, as the door swung silently open. The reason he could only see the side of his friend was that his friend was not alone. There was another person in the room. Another man.

With his arms tight around Langly, his mouth pressed to Langly's neck.

As Byers stood there, blinking, Langly's mouth curled into an almost cruel smile of pleasure. He had one arm hooked around the other man's waist, pulling their bodies hard together. His other hand was caught in the man's dark, shaggy hair, and he seemed to be yanking on it as the man licked at and bit his neck.

Licked at. And bit. His neck. Langly.

</what?!/>

Byers must have spoken his startled thought out loud, because suddenly the men broke apart and turned to stare back at him. Suddenly John felt dizzy, and he took a step back. The other man - dressed in a black shirt and jeans, with a leather jacket half shrugged off his shoulders, with that dark hair in need of a trim and handsome, proud face in need of a shave -

<I know him>

But he couldn't think. <close the door walk away close the door walk away> his brain repeated at him in a monotone, but he couldn't move either. Because what he'd felt, when he realized what he was seeing - in that moment before surprise set in - was anger. A rising, huge anger, tinged with some bitter, awful other thing, some emotion he couldn't identify.

<you know what it was> he thinks, remembering, and shakes his head as if to clear it.

His own reaction to it startled him as much as what he saw, and so he was paralyzed. The moment seemed to go on forever, three men staring at each other, his friend's face drawn into an expression of irritation he'd never seen before and didn't much like.

The the other man laughed.

Once, a sharp, mocking sound. He moved away from Langly, toward the door.

"You have company," he said. "Ta-ta, Ringo."

</Ringo/?!>

The inner prude was cringing with embarassment. Byers felt very aware of himself, and very awkward. His suit seemed to hang on his body, his beard felt like a living, warm thing. Still all he could was stand there as the man moved for the door. He found himself face to face with this creature who called his friend Ringo, and for a moment thought he was being challanged, then realized he was blocking the door.

Habitual motions took over, and he politely moved out of the way.

Just as the man was about to leave, Langly unfroze and moved to the door as well, kissing the other man's cheek lightly. "Call me, Alex," he said.

Byers gave up. His shoulders slumped and he looked away, at the floor, at anything but the men standing in the doorway. After a moment, the door closed and Langly moved back into the room, standing at the window again. Byers had no idea what to do or say now. The Letter was, for the moment, forgotten. He was about to just mumble an apology and slip away, when his brain caught up to his ears.

He looked up. Langly was looking at him, arms folded across his unmarked gray t-shirt. Waiting. He'd slipped his glasses back on, and with them a blank, emotionless expression.

"Did you call him Alex?" Byers asked softly.

Langly sighed and turned away, flicking up the shade with one hand and looking out into the street. Byers felt like he was in the presence of a stranger, but he pushed on.

"Langly," he said. And then he knew. He knew where he'd seen the other man before. "Langly. Was that Alex Kry - "

"John," Langly said, cutting him off without turning around again. "I think you should leave." His voice was soft, with a familiar rasp that now seemed foreign, strange.

And then - slowly turning from the room, feeling numb and exhausted, moving back down the stairs to his car - then it finally occured to him that there had been two people who were definitely listening, the night he'd had that conversation with Frohike. Langly had been there as well, typing furiously away at one of the computers and appearing not to be listening. And Mel himself, of course.

And the HQ wasn't bugged. And both of the others had access to his post office box key.

And one of them was - well, spending time with a man they all knew was a traitor, and a spy.

As these thoughts started to file through his mind, working under the surface in that deep, secret place he put things when he couldn't look at them quite yet, just one came to the top and hovered there, refusing to be fought off.

<I wish he'd call me John more often>

It wasn't until he got all the way back to the HQ that he realized he'd forgotten to fasten his seatbelt.

Now, finally letting it all rise up and be considered, looking into the mirror, John feels the moment of decision approaching again. He has to tell Frohike what he suspects - which is that Langly is reporting their conversations to Alex Krycek and Krycek has threatened him, or that Langly himself is doing so. But he doesn't want to. He wants to confront Langly, to say everything he should have back there in the apartment. They have said nothing to each other about it - there's a vast, heavy silence between them. John has spent long enough staring at the other man, trying to see into his thoughts.

He carries The Letter with him everywhere. The urgency of the whole thing can't be put off any longer, he tells himself each time he brings it out and reads it over again. It /is/ time. He has to act, to move, and he wants it to be the right action, but finally he knows that the only wrong thing is to not act at all.

<surprise them, that's the key> he thinks. <go right for what they don't expect.>

He looks at his own face. There's too much innocense in it, he's always thought. His eyes give him away. He tries to be stern, square, upright, but really he has felt, for a long time, as if he is in a constant state of freefall. All he has to comfort him on the way down is hope, and he wears that hope in his eyes. Along with the fear.

Life in a box, he thinks again. Better than no life at all.

<It's time, John Fitzgerald Byers.>

And he knows what he has to do. Suddenly the anger returns, big as life, and his own motion startles him as his fist lashes out and smashes the mirror, slamming into the glass hard enough to drive splinters into his skin.

"Fuck the box," he tells his now-disjointed reflection, and leaves the room. He goes to his computer, settles in, and starts typing. His hand aches, he's getting blood on the keyboard, but he can't afford to pause to bandage it. He's going to need all day to figure out where he can find Alex Krycek.

END PRELUDE


End file.
